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Know the Common Differences: Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO

What is Search Engine Optimization or SEO?

If you’re not in the know, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a vital digital marketing strategy that is used to improve a website’s Search Engine Results. SEO  helps drive web traffic to your site organically. You can read more about SEO marketing and additional tips on our SEO Tips for Hawaii Businesses blog post.

Black Hat SEO vs. White Hat SEO

In this blog post, we provide an overview of the Black Hat and White Hat approaches to common SEO Marketing strategies. By understanding their differences, you can confidently distinguish which SEO marketing tactics will improve or hinder your online presence. 

You may have heard that White Hat or Gray Hat is the preferred and ethical practice of SEO marketing. This idea is prevalent because the White Hat approach follows the Webmasters Guidelines, which lists techniques that have long term benefits for your online presence. These techniques will also reduce the risk of being penalized by Google’s algorithms because they’re geared towards creating a valuable audience experience on your site. Going the White Hat route does require more effort and time on your behalf, but the payoff is well worth it. 

Black Hat SEO marketing includes “quick win” approaches that work outside the Webmaster Guidelines, thus manipulating the search engine’s algorithms to get a higher SERP ranking. Although controversial, these methods do work, but only for a short amount of time and the result of using these taboo techniques may get your web site penalized by Google and other search engines. We here at Team Vision Marketing  highly recommend avoiding the use of Black Hat SEO techniques because they cater to the search result’s algorithms, instead of benefitting your customers with rich content. Remember, the health of your online presence relies on the number of people that visit your site, how long they stay on your site, and how many pages they visit. 

What Happens When You Use Black Hat SEO?

You can’t cheat your way to the top of the SERP unscathed. Although it’s not illegal, Black Hat SEO tactics are shady tactics that violate the Webmasters Guidelines. If caught, Google will send a preliminary warning against your site and lower your ranking, giving you the chance to correct the wrong. Once you fix your SEO issues, you can submit a reconsideration request to restore your ranking. If your site continues to break the search engine’s rules, the site will be excluded from the SERP. Ultimately, this will your weaken your online presence and negatively impact your company’s reputation.

Creating Web Content

Content is one of the top key factors that affect your search rankings. However, your web page’s content is a broad web component that isn’t limited to materials created by you. It also includes the information or materials shared from other content creators.

White Hat:

White Hat SEO marketers understand that Google rewards sites that regularly post valuable content. The higher the rank, the more likely you will receive increased web traffic and new leads to your site.

Knowing this, you should create excellent content that covers trending topics, and that includes popular search words and phrases. Your content should also include credible links and share other high-quality materials, like videos or infographics, that help your audience discover new content creators or in-depth information sources. You should also regularly update older pieces of content with current information.

TIP: We suggest writing longer blog posts (current recommendation is 2,500 words or more). Longer blog posts help make your posts stand out not just to your audiences but to Google, as well. Think about it, longer content means more keywords and backlinks.

Black Hat:

When it comes to creating content, Black Hat SEO marketers will try to use auto-generated content. This is content created programmatically, using a set of rules or scripts instead of original content to trick Google filters. If you come across an online article that is full of grammatical and spelling errors, has duplicated information, is full of spam adverts, or includes nonsensical strings of keywords, it was probably auto-generated.

Adding Keywords and Key Phrases

Mixing in popular, relevant keywords and key phrases in the content, tags, and metadata are important to improving your  SERP ranking. These tactics help direct leads to your web site via search engine inquiries.  

White Hat:

The proper way of using keywords is to pair  your content with a blend of primary and secondary (AKA related) keywords. We suggest brainstorming search phrases related to your content or research keywords with tools like Google Trends, Google Search Console, and Google Correlated. You can even use the “Search related to _____” section at the end of the SERP for keyword inspiration (Image 1). 

TIP: Optimize your content for long-tail keywords (long-tail keywords are keyword phrases that contain at least three words). They’re more specific and less competitive than generic keyword terms. Long-tail keywords are also optimized for voice searches.

Black Hat:

A common Black Hat hack for incorporating keywords into content, according to HubSpot, is keyword stuffing. Essentially, keyword stuffing is using an unnecessarily large amount of irrelevant or repetitive keywords in an attempt to rank higher for key search phrases. This is most commonly seen as blocks of text repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural. 

Here’s an example of keyword stuffing:

Another common controversial keyword hack is hiding text, which is used to trick audiences without raising red flags. This method can trick the search engines into taking account of all these keywords and ultimately result in a higher search engine ranking. 

Here are the following ways Google says that black hat practitioners can disguise text and links:

• Using white text on a white background
• Locating text behind an image
• Using CSS to position text off-screen
• Setting the font size to 0
• Hiding a link by only linking one small character—for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph

Getting More Backlinks

Backlinks or inbound links are incoming links to your web site. These links help add credibility to your content, as they are considered as a vote of confidence that your content is high-quality.

White Hat:

There are a number of authentic ways you can increase backlinks, but they do require time and effort. Here are our 3 tips on effective, Google-compliant methods of increasing backlinks:

1. Build a reputation as an expert in your field by frequently producing high-quality content, like blog posts, infographics, videos, or reports. Once established, other reputable web sites will want to share your content on their site and add backlinks to your site.

2. Network with popular blogs relating to your field or participate on news web sites as a guest blogger. Guest blogging, when executed within Google’s guidelines, is a highly effective SEO marketing strategy where you publish your content on another web site. This gives you the opportunity to increase brand awareness and create backlinks, thus enhancing your web traffic with a new set of audiences.

3. Moz.com suggests trying out “Ego Baiting”, which is a type of well-researched content that recognizes the excellence of highly reputable bloggers, industry leaders, etc. for the purpose of building a link networking relationship. “The hope is that, by being included, these people feel better about and are more inclined to share the content with a link,” according to Moz.com. This process includes outreaching to the recognized companies or individuals to encourage them to share the link to your “ego baiting” content on their site. 

Black Hat:

Creating Private Blog Networks (PBN) is a Black Hat SEO technique used to increase backlinks inorganically.  PBN are a collection of spam web sites or blogs that will backlink to a central web site (see Image 3). PBN cheat Google’s algorithm by artificially boosting the “trustworthiness” of the central web site. You can easily tell if a website is a part of this scheme if the content of the PBN web sites are basic or repetitive and if they all backlink to one site.

Building Structured Data & Schema

Think of Structured Data and Schema as something similar to metadata. These HTML tags help organize your web site’s data and add more descriptions to your content. This, in turn, helps search engines understand your web site better to create enhanced search results via rich snippets like reviews and phone numbers. 

White Hat:

White Hat SEO marketing will use Structured Data and Schema to enhance their look on SERP by adding extra helpful details that their search audience will find valuable. For example, a boutique hotel will add tags to include room rates (Image 4) or a cooking blog will add tags that will show the calories of their dishes (Image 5).

TIP: Write strategically compelling tags that will help your site stand out from your competitors. Make sure to monitor your competitors search listing results so that you can evaluate and modify your Structured Data and Schema to remain competitive.

Black Hat:

Someone practicing Black Hat SEO will abuse Structured Data and Schema by providing inaccurate information to fool search engines and users into clicking onto their web site. For example, you can use Schema markups to artificially inflate your positive reviews or ratings with a fake review site, and use structured data to make the fake reviews stand out on search results pages.

Conclusion:

White hat Search Engine Optimization is the best way to sustain your long-term online presence and increase your overall web traffic. With our White Hat tips, you can increase your web traffic organically, build strong networks with other reputable sites, and strengthen your site’s credibility. 

Black Hat SEO techniques should be avoided as much as possible. While these shady tactics can achieve short-term results, search engines have created specialized algorithms to penalize Black Hat techniques:

• Florida, which penalizes keyword stuffing
• Panda, which penalizes content farms
• Penguin, which penalizes certain bad linking practices

These penalties include lower search engine rankings, a decrease in web traffic, having your web site banned on the SERP, and a crippled reputation. 

If you found this blog post on common White Hat vs. Black Hat Search Engine Optimization techniques interesting and insightful, please give us a call at (808) 536-0416 to learn how we can help you improve your digital marketing efforts. For over 20 years, we’ve been a leading full-service Hawaii advertising agency, web design and digital marketing firm. But don’t take our word for it, please view our client video testimonials and hear directly from our key clients on how we helped grow their businesses.

Contact Us:

Phone: (808) 536-0416

Email: info@www.teamvision.com

Web: www.www.teamvision.com

Hear directly from Dolly Moreno, Dirctor of Sales & Marketing at Honua Kai Resort & Spa, on her experience working with Team Vision Marketing.

Sources:

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/331480

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/black-hat-seo

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building/tactics